re: Crawfish - Over-Soaking

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Because the BR area thinks they know about food, which for the most part they don’t.

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Based on what? I'm relatively new to boiling crawfish, i've only been doing it about 3 or 4 years, but i think that gives me a fresh perspective. It's anecdotal, but my father-in-law, who has been boiling crawfish his entire life, after having mine said, "well Bug, i think i can hang up my paddle and let you do them from now on". Which was a pretty big complement.

That said, i'm not stuck in any one convention. As with my "BR area" cooking, every thing i cook, i try to improve. Sometimes, "this is how i've done it for 30 years" doesn't necessarily means it's the best. I also homebrew beer, and even some things i've learned from homebrewing i've carried over into crawfish cooking.

For example, hops have some of the same essential oils as citrus. When you brew hazy IPA's, the new convention is to add the bulk of your hops towards the end of the boil, and even after shutoff, because you will boil off some of those hop aromatics. Adding the hops late, gives hazy IPA's that juicy/fruity flavor/aroma (among other techniques). It can logically be inferred, that this same thing happens with adding lemons/oranges early in the boil. I've tried it a few times, and i have noticed more citrus in the crawfish, but i have not done a side by side of adding all the fruit early vs adding all late. Right now i'm about 50/50 fruit added at the beginning, and 50% of the fruit added at flameout, during the soak.

Oh, and i use ice too.

Negatory. 1 large bag of Swampdust added to the water.

Lawd. You know how a sponge will soak up water? A live crawfish does the same. Do you actually think a crawfish in boiling water isn’t soaking up water after it’s dead? That it has to soak? That somehow more spice will be added?

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Lawd. You know how a sponge will soak up water?

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I do

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A live crawfish does the same

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Just so I make sure I understand. Your position is that a crawfish absorbs water at exactly the same rate as a sponge?

You know that is not true, right?

Just put any piece of meat in heavily salted water. Do you honestly believe that if you leave it in for 1 minute, versus 1 hour, 2 hours, hell, overnight...that the the meat will taste the same no matter how long it is in the salted water

You've got to be trolling. If so, well done!

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If you aren’t going to two pot method, then cut the heat on the boil pot when it starts foaming good. It doesn’t have to completely rolling boil and damn sure doesn’t need to boil for five minutes.

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there's some decent and horrible advice in this thread, but if you follow this quoted statement, you will do fine


It's very rare I ever get a rolling boil unless they are huge crawfish

So soaking crawfish in a pot for 30 minutes is going to have the sane amount of spice as if I cut the fire and immediately pull the crawfish out?

In reality, food cooks at high temps. 212F isn’t some magical number that begins the cooking process. It’s just a good point of reference for cooks to use.

They just need to make a sous vide machine large enough for a sack of crawfish and we’ll have perfect crawfish every time.

I kid

Tell me how soaking will add more spice. There is only so much spice. It’s diluted in the water. Soaking won’t add more spice. It’s impossible to add more spice, without actually adding more spice to the water.

You know you can just take the lid off after the burner is turned off and spray the pot with a waterhole and most of the time the crawfish will sink within 15 minutes and no over cooking or diluting water.(just spray the bottom real good)

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It’s impossible to add more spice, without actually adding more spice to the water.

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It's called diffusion you dumb hayseed. You should've learned that in 8th grade science class but you were jacking off in the cane field.